Category: ideas

January 20, 2012

What a week. On Wednesday the Interwebs shut down. On Thursday Apple revolutionized textbooks. What will Friday bring? But after the hype has settled down (and yes, it was hard not to get a little swept away by all the great sounding announcements) we wake up with a slight hang-over this morning. Audrey Waters went […]

November 25, 2008

Mark Surman is speaking to the City of Toronto about how openness can help create a better city — much in the same way that it helped create a better Internet. In his truly open ways, he has been blogging about it, and has posted his speaker notes and draft slides online for comment. Most […]

October 9, 2008

Ars Technica, usually the place of choice for in-depth technology reviews, publishes a fantastic fact-checking exercise on the estimated “damages” that the strong Intellectual Property lobby commonly promotes. The find that the two most often cited numbers, “750,000 jobs lost to IP theft” and “$200 – $250 billion cost of IP infringement to the US […]

October 5, 2008

A response to Nicholas Carr‘s recent piece in The Atlantic points out that the “digital divide” goes much beyond access to technology issues. A UCLA researcher studying memory and aging, notes that the use of certain technologies can rewire the way we think – with wide ranging implications on what social practices we develop. In […]

September 24, 2008

I just saw a great presentation by Haishuo Lee who works at a technical University of Taiwan. He presented a model that I think holds a lot of promise for UWC and other Universities in Africa as well. The University created video lectures for three of its foundational courses (in this case Calculus I and […]

September 22, 2008

One characteristic of open source or free software development processes is to release code early (but not too early) and often. This allows the community of users, testers, and contributors to review progress – identify errors and try out features early on so things can still be changed before a lot of time was invested. […]

August 24, 2008

Thanks to everyone who was there, the open everything event on Friday was a blast. A special round of applause to the lovely Birds ladies for keeping us all well refreshed and fed, and a big thank you to Helen King and the Shuttleworth Foundation for sponsoring those who could not afford to pay and […]

July 31, 2008

Walking towards the conference venue on this last day of the open education track at the iSummit 08 I found myself humming along to the melody of Mark Morrison’s “Return of the Mack” – how fitting I thought – since this was truly the Return of the Track (the Open Education Track). Last year Gunner […]

June 25, 2008

Derek pointed me to this post on entrepreneurial education by Jon Bischke, CEO of eduFire.com. I like the spirit of entrepreneurship and innovation that Jon promotes. Where I don’t agree with him is that entrepreneurial is the same as market-driven. Reading through his post, I remembered Derek Bok’s excellent “Universities in the Marketplace“, which analyses […]